Among the current important news of travel is a sudden and mysterious drop in tourist traffic to the so-called “Mexican Caribbean” (Cancun, Playa del Carmen, Isla Mujeres, Tulum, the Mayan Riviera), an area which usually accounts for half of all tourism to Mexico.
After several speculative guesses as to what is happening, scientists and Mexican officials have agreed that the cause is “sa...

My friend Deborah "borrowed" her favorite wool blanket from a hotel when she went on a business trip. Shannon, another pal, put her able-bodied daughter in an airport wheelchair to jump to the front of a Southwest Airlines boarding line so they could snag seats together. And Dave, a charming guy I know from college, owns a cane for the sole purpose of limping into airports so he can plausibly c...

Turns out I was too limited in recently listing the western European nations partially or wholly controlled by neo-Nazis.
You can now add Austria (for reasons set forth below) to the countries whose current government will cause progressive people all over the world to cease visiting them.
Although the new ruling party in Austria is not itself far right-wing, they have apparently...

Is a travel boycott ever justified? A controversy over that claim is currently raging in the travel trade press.
I had an aunt, now deceased, who was one of the world’s gentlest creatures. She tolerated every person, found worth in every person, treated everyone with respect.
But she made one exception: for the population of Poland.
She could not forget the times,...

Let’s be frank: Traveling to Europe this summer will be more difficult than in recent years. Which is all the more reason to consider, and then overcome, a number of obstacles.
What has resulted in these problems? First, the initial cost of flying to various European capitals will undoubtedly be higher than before.
That major champion of low-cost transatlantic air travel, WOW Ai...

Frances Mayes, author of the memoir Under the Tuscan Sun, is to Tuscan travel what ketchup is to Russian dressing. For tens of thousands of vacationers, her tale—both the book that sat on the New York Times bestseller list for two years, and the Diane Lane film that fictionalized it—was the reason they chose to go this bucolic and beautiful corner of "The Boot." Now Mayes has a new book called...

The gym where I work out (when I’m feeling up to it and can’t find anything good on Netflix) is housed in a building that stands where there used to be a mosque founded by Yemeni immigrants and frequented by jazz musicians.
The Apollo Theater is just about a block east on 125th St. in Harlem, where I live. Back in the 1940s and ‘50s, performers at that legendary Upper Manhattan venue are said t...

On an island in the waters off New York, is a giant statue inscribed with the immortal words of Emma Lazarus: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…”
It—the Statue of Liberty—is visited each year by three million American tourists who often weep when they read those words.
In the months ahead, those same tourists, by their political inaction, will h...

When I first learned that a granddaughter of mine was planning to spend three months in Japan earning her room and board through work performed as a volunteer, I was concerned and suspicious.
It was only after we had heard from previous volunteers of this sort that I grew calm about this partial use of her “gap year” from college.
The organization that plans such volunteer work in countrie...

When the current governor of California recently announced that he was discontinuing work on a high-speed rail line between Los Angeles and San Francisco, multitudes of train enthusiasts all but wept.
How, they cried, could a poor country like Spain operate high-speed trains between Madrid and Barcelona, while wealthy California could not find the same resources in America?
The god of trai...